PF SEMANTIC NETWORKS IN ARCHITECTURE REPRESENTATION: THE AOSTA CASE STUDY

In this paper I give account upon the application of an innovative tool such as PF sematic network for representing the startup phase of an architectural project. This experience has been carried on didactics along a Master Degree Class in the Civil Architecture Faculty of Politecnico di Milano during the academic years 2010/11 and 2011/12 and is still running in the current year. PF network (PF stands for Papi/Forzani), theory have been presented in ICERi 2012 conference and this is a practical application of the method to a real case study. The task the students received was the design of an exibit pavillon of a given dimention in the roman city center. Students had to use a PF network structure to analize the area and to prepare a grid of possible architectural solutions.The whole procedure has been supervised step-by-step by the teaching staff: it started with a direct visit in the area of interest, with a detailed general, photographic and metric survey of the foro romano (roman main court, named "criptoportico"). The second phase was the construction of the place-transition table, which is necessary for organizing the semantic net, and finally the roman center area has been represented through a complete PF network.The final project of the pavillon has been made focusing the interest on the choice criteria in all the design solutions: they were always constrained to derive from the data that the PF net could give and used as guidelines. This procedure gave us very good results in terms of achitectural quality and intelectual aknowledgement of the design process. The best projects and the corresponding generation network will be shown.